Monday, January 4, 2016

Rocks in Her Head

Greetings, WYMOP fans!

I know we just had the New Year and all, and everyone's posting My Year in Review articles and making resolutions online, and to tell you the truth, that's what I was going to do as well. I was going to tell you some of the things I did with my writing in the past year, and how they were going to affect the next 361 days of my life. I sat down and started to do just that: I had a list, and pictures—all kinds of good stuff.

And then it all went horribly awry. Way off the rails. I think the technical term for what I did is that I "@#$%ed it all up." I mean big time.

So I bailed on it. It was 11:00 on the night the damn blog was due, and there was no way I could fix that hot mess in time. It's 11:45 now, and I just banged out the little story you see below. Honestly, if I didn't work with some highly amusing people, I would have been screwed. Ready?

True story—

I was sitting in the break room this morning, writing for a while before I clocked in, when I heard all this commotion from the workroom floor. Now, I couldn't see what was going on, but I could identify the voices, and it sounded like one of the women I work with was just all kinds of excited.

"My son got hit in the head with a rock! He was gushing blood all over the place, and I didn't have a phone! This is one of the rare times when I don't have a phone. They were playing a game, see, and this neighborhood kid wanted to cause a distraction or something, so he picked up a rock and threw it at this fence. It's one of those metal fences, you know? What are they called . . . chain! He biffs this rock at this chain fence and it bounced off and hit my son in the head! He was gushing blood all over the place! And I didn't have a phone—this is like the one time I don't have a phone, right?"

Things went on like that for quite a while, I'd say five minutes of full on exclamation points, before someone thought to ask "Well, Jesus, was this right before work?"

"No," she said, just about out of breath. "Yesterday afternoon."

They established that, though she was completely worked up about it all over again, it had actually happened more than twelve hours earlier, and her son was just fine. Something occurred to me, and I chuckled. I kept right on chuckling as I put my writing stuff away and clocked in; then I went over to the guy who works right next to her—the one who'd asked the question.

“Hey,” I said, loud enough for the people about us to hear. “Did you catch that thing on the news this morning?”

He gave me a blank stare.

“You didn’t hear?” This elicited a shake of the head, so I continued, turning slightly toward the excitable woman and including her in our conversation. “There was this thing in the news this morning about women in this country—mothers—who are beating their kids with stones.”

“What are you talking about?” said the excitable woman.

“It was on the news. These women, see, they’re throwing stones at their own kids. It’s a mental thing.”

“My kid was hit with a rock—” she started, but I rolled right over her.

“Yeah, but these women, they’re hitting their kids with stones, then blaming it on neighborhood kids.”

Her eyes lit up, her mouth opening again to comment.

“And then these women get all yelly and arm-flappy about it the next day, because they like the attention.”

Now she was giving me the blank stare, though the guy working next to her was grinning.

“It’s this new mental thing they’ve discovered. They call it Munchausen by Rocks. See?”

The guy burst out laughing, while she slapped me on the arm and called me a bum, and though she knows me and usually gets my sense of humor, she had a low opinion of me for the rest of the day. But that’s okay.